As it was announced in our blog earlier, our team was going to participate in Google Developers Day in Moscow. So we did.

Here I wish to say thanks to Alexei Shelestenko, from Google Russia, for making an exception for us allowing more than 2 people to come. It was really important that we don’t share out train coupe with some non-geek people :)) Seriously, imagine Russian customs officers entering seeing 4 silent guys with laptops coding something. Their facial expression. Priceless.

Click “More” to check our photos and read more about the event.

Speaking seriously it was important to send multiple delegates there as the Day programme was really intensive with multiple lectures and practices going in different rooms at the same time. So we had 4 people to spread out to 4 locations to be able to catch up with everything. Clever, huh?

By the way, here is one of the many nice things with which Google attracts young IT minds. They have named conference rooms by sci-fi writers’ names. Here is me standing near such signpost saying Bradbury, Asimov, Lem, Sheckley.

Ok, so most of our team have started with a practical session of deep study of the App Engine, as the official programme mentioned. The session was given by Jens Trapp, Jon McAlister and Jean-Laurent Wotton. What did we learn from the session:

• Google engineers don’t bite you, they are normal people and are really friendly and communicative.

Jens and Jon were really helping us during the practice, explaining some Python trics etc.

• It is quite easy to work with App Engine and create your own apps, you just have to learn some Python and also GQL (which is like SQL but read only :))

Generally, it was very interesting in the beginning. We were expecting some hard coding action, which as we have later realized was impossible - everybody in the room was moving with their own pace. Some people didn’t pre-install all the necessary environments etc, some didn’t understand the task at all. So it was nice to do some coding and especially have that direct communication with Jens and Jon but later the practice has really slowed down due to the reason I’ve mentioned.

Check out the photo of good boys coding some basic wiki App in Python :

At this photo you may see how Injoit cares about its clients, during the practical session Vladimir is checking is everything allright with Frantsia.ru project, a project in which by the way he has played a leading role in coding the Google map powered properties search and invented some sophisticated Ajax trics for better integration. Find out more about this project in our portfolio - Frantsia.ru, Google map powered real estate web portal.

And here’s the photo from official Google photographer, you can see another good boy (me) and one really bored girl behind. I have later passed my laptop to Alex and had few words with her.

There was an illustrative situation when Jens and Jon were guiding us through some coding for quite a while already so everybody should have had some app done by that time and the girl has asked some guy sitting aside

- What is everybody doing now, I can’t understand a thing?

- Ummm… Installing the software :-]

So anyway thanks to Jens and Jon and let’s move on.

A lecture by Brad Neuberg can’t be unmentioned. The guy looks like rapper when you look at the photos:

but he is actually one of the prominent engineers at Google and a great presenter. Brad was talking about making applications with Gears.

From the first glance one may think Gears is a move opposite to the Cloud Computing trend established by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Apps and APIs and their followers. With cloud computing you rely more on super power of remote servers, grid calculations etc so you try to push the calculations far away to be able to deal with more interesting things. While with Gears it’s a move towards using client’s computer calculational power to deal with some of the tasks. Actually it’s something like advanced Javascript, with its own database, threads etc. - So, is it actually a move to the future? - you may ask.

I would say it is, as in many cases Gears boost the quickness of interaction - your web interface doesn’t have to wait for remote server after each click of yours making it as quick as good old software interface.

So we can see now that Gears along with Cloud Computing are processes leading us to a new web, which is going to be faster, more intelligent, user-friendly and rich with new possibilities.

So thanks to Brad for our better understanding of these global processes and the mechanism of Gears in particular.

After this lecture we have parted again and all the Injoit team has spread out - someone wandered off for free snacks and Coke, someone to visit other lectures or practices, or play huge chess, or have a Wii walk

I personally found myself interested in Jon McAlister’s lecture on App Engine. On top of the practical session this lecture has given me the better understanding of how we could use these technologies in our work. Also I have used an oppotunity to ask questions to try and find out of what are the Google plans for making the Search API (e.g. making possible to build your own systems using Google powered crawling, indexing, page ranking etc). Unfortunately, according to Jon, there are more important tasks to Google now so we aren’t talking about such thing added to App Engine in nearest future. Alas, as this would be really beneficial for my scientific research on self organizing web portals, so as for many other researchers and developers who could construct more intelligent and subject- or community- oriented search systems based on Google’s architecture.

A bit of disappointment in what apart from that was a perfect conference was the fact we didn’t have a chance to find out more about Android development which is a subject of special interest for us.

So that was mainly it. You may find more in the blogs of my colleagues (links below). Here are some more photos (”when the party is over..”)

Well huge thanks and regards to all of the conference organizational staff and all the presenters and engineers preparing materials for the event. Thanks to Injoit directors board headed by Mr Sanjeev Bhagat for agreeing to allocate funds for the travel. Thanks to Google for a free bottle of Miller.

Useful links

Here you can donwload presentations from Google developers day Moscow 2008

YouTube videos regarding the developers day 2008

Report from Oleg our HTML coder

Report from Vladimir our PHP developer

Report from Alex our project manager